Image by Manny Becerra.

A far-right President was elected in 2024 despite a strong majority of Americans supporting progressive economic and social policies. How can we begin to cohere this progressive majority into a winning political force under the Trump administration?

I will argue here that we are going to have to build an independent political movement from the bottom up, community by community, to provide a viable political home for the progressive majority. An independent political movement should focus on electing thousands to local office during the Trump administration. On that foundation of public credibility, organizational capacity, and experienced local officials and campaigners, the movement can then run credible and often winning elections in their local districts to the state houses and the US House of Representatives. The strategic goal of each local party in this independent progressive political movement should be their district’s US House seat. When the independent left has a caucus in the House, it will begin to have real leverage on national policy.

The Democratic Party is no home for the progressive majority, which cannot capture it due to its upper and upper-middle class leadership and the party’s undemocratic and money-drenched power structure. Social movements on their own are not enough to have much influence on national policy without an independent progressive political alternative that threatens to take progressive votes that the Democrats now take for granted. Nor does any national party or organization have the organization and resources today to organize a credible independent progressive party across the nation.

I say that as a Green Party member. My message here is certainly directed to Greens, but also to progressive activists in general. While a Green ballot line can be used in many states for independent political action, some progressives may want to run under another party label. The task under Trump is to organize, under Green and perhaps multiple party labels, strong local independent progressive political parties across the nation. It cannot be organized from any national center now, but it could become a national movement for local independent political action.

When a critical mass of local independent progressive parties is electing thousands to local office, and on that organized foundation electing their candidates to state houses and the US House, then we will have the organized mass base to come together in a national independent progressive party that can compete for power with the two-party-system of corporate rule.

There is no mystery to how to build a bottom-up independent progressive political movement. The question is whether the progressive left is willing to put the work into organizing their own commmunities.

A Political Parodox

Why did a progressive-leaning public elect a far-right president? I studied the exit polling and other public opinion polling to understand how this happened in a recent article in New Politics.[1] What I found was that Trump did not expand his white base but that Harris lost enough of the traditional Democratic base to lose the election. In fact, Harris gained 2.7 million more white votes than Biden received in 2020. Trump’s share of the white vote has not increased over his three presidential campaigns: 57 percent in 2016, 58 percent in 2020, and 57 percent in 2024. While Trump gained 2.0 million votes of people of color in 2024 compared to 2020, the margin of difference in the election was the 6.9 million people of color who voted for Biden in 2020 but did not vote for Harris or Trump in 2024. Most of them stayed home and a small portion voted third party.

The top issue by far for voters in 2024 was the economy. Harris lost voters who ranked the economy as their top issue by an 80 percent to 18 percent margin. Harris campaigned on a tone-deaf “politics of joy” when many people were hurting. She campaigned with anti-Trump Republicans and boasted that she had more billionaire contributors than Trump. She did not give economically distressed people, particularly people of color, good reasons to vote for her.

Trump campaigned as the anti-establishment outsider, the change candidate in a change election. Eighty-three percent of voters said they wanted “substantial change” (56 percent) or “complete and total upheaval” (17 percent).[2] Trump won 3.1 million votes he did not get in 2020, the majority of them from 2.0 million people of color. This disaffected cohort seems to have tuned out Trump’s racist dog-whistling and responded to his message that Biden, Harris, and the Democrats had wrecked the economy, raised their costs of living, and reduced their opportunities for advancement.

When I reviewed polling on where people stand on economic and social issues, it was clear there is a strong progressive majority in America. If Harris had campaigned for progressive populist economic policies that addressed the economic concerns of so many voters, she likely would have won the election with the votes of traditional but economically distressed Democratic voters who sat this election out because they saw no help coming from Harris. The polls show that strong majorities support progressive economic programs such as Medicare for All (60 percent), Green New Deal (65 percent), rent control (68 percent), universal free childcare (73 percent), taxing the rich and big business (79 percent), and raising the minimum wage (86 percent).

Strong majorities also support progressive political and social reforms like ranked choice voting (61 percent), abolishing the Electoral College (63 percent), abortion rights (63 percent), legalized same-sex marriage (71 percent), and respectful treatment of transgender people (74 percent). While Harris tried to out-Trump Trump on immigration by highlighting her support for the Republican-drafted anti-immigrant bill that Trump had told the Republican House to quash for the duration of the campaign so he could hammer away at the immigration issue, the Fox exit poll found that the voters favored offering undocumented immigrants a chance for legal status over deportation by a 56 percent to 40 percent margin.[3]

While Trump and his MAGA Republicans control of the presidency, both houses of Congress, and the Supreme Court, how can we organize this progressive majority into a winning political majority?

The Democratic Party Dead End

Progressives Democrats are encouraged by the recent victory of Zohran Mamdani in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary. The independent progressive political movement should study and learn from Mamdani’s exemplary campaign. But the contradictions between Mamdani’s progressive policy goals and trying to achieve them within the Democratic Party are already apparent. I will discuss that in the concluding section of this article.

Reform the Democratic Party into a progressive party?

Many progressive still argue that the Democrats can win by running on a progressive economic platform. Yes, some will win, as they have been doing in more progressive districts since the New Deal. But that has never been enough to transform the Democratic Party as a whole from a party beholden to corporate interests into one promoting the interests of the working-class majority.

By this time, after 50 years, since the Carter administration, of increasingly neoliberal economic policies from the Democrats, it should be clear that the Democratic Party will never return to its New Deal liberalism of the 1930s to 1970s. The power structure of the Democratic Party is its super-rich donors and its upper-middle class professional cadre of elected officials, campaign and party staff, and associated think tanks and non-profit advocacy groups. This upper and upper-middle class leadership of the Democratic Party is allergic to taxing themselves to fund a new New Deal of progressive economic programs like universal public health care or free public education from childcare through college. The high-income class bias of the Democratic leadership is why Harris did not and could not campaign on an egalitarian redistributive economic platform.

The leaders of the Democratic Party may be the socially liberal wing of the upper and upper-middle classes, but they share a neoliberal fiscal conservatism with the Republicans. Neoliberal deregulation, privatization, public austerity, and top-end tax cuts have been bipartisan pursuits since Democratic votes in the House and Senate gave Reagan’s tax cuts for the rich and spending cuts for social programs the majorities they needed to pass Congress in the 1980s. Instead of fighting the right, the Democrats have compromised with it, from Bill Clinton’s “triangulation” with the Gingrich Republicans to Joe Biden’s pitiful pursuit of bipartisanship with the MAGA Republicans who tried to overthrow his election. Nor is the Democrats’ social liberalism reliable, as we saw with Harris reinforcing and normalizing the nativist racism of the MAGA Republicans by campaigning for their anti-immigrant bill.

The progressive minority of the congressional Democratic Party has given the party a progressive veneer since the corporate New Democrats displaced the old New Deal Democrats as the majority faction. Based in the Congressional Black Caucus in the late 20th century and the Congressional Progressive Caucus in the 21st century, the progressives have never come close to controlling the party. They have not won a single major progressive reform that they have proposed over the last 50 years, from a job guarantee and universal public health care to military spending cuts and progressive tax reform to fund social provision, policies they have advanced with ever-diminishing clarity and energy as the years have gone by.

A progressive takeover of the Democratic Party?

Some progressives argue that while the Democratic Party will not reform itself, progressives can take the power in the party from its corporate wing and transform it into a pro-labor social-democratic party. Wave after wave of reform Democrats have tried to do that, from the CIO’s Political Action Committee in the 1940s, to the New Politics and realignment movements of the 1950s to 1970s, Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition in the 1980s, and Bernie Sanders’ campaigns in 2016 and 2020. The corporate Democrats are still firmly in control.

The problem for reformers is that the Democratic Party is a memberless party. One cannot join the Democrats as a member with a voice and vote within party structures. One doesn’t join the party by agreeing to its principles, supporting it with membership dues, and participating in a local branch. One becomes a Democrat, no matter what one’s political principles, by registering in the party with the state in order to vote in state-run party primaries in 31 states and D.C., or in the 19 states without party registration by choosing the party’s ballot at a primary polling place, or by simply voting for Democrats in general elections.

Activists can work their way onto county and state committees by petitioning for usually uncontested seats in primary elections or by getting appointed to fill vacancies. But so what? These committees can endorse and petition for candidates, but nominations are determined by primaries, where the well-funded corporate Democrats dominate. These committees can, but rarely do, adopt policy platforms, but the politicians are free to ignore them. I watched the Vermont Rainbow Coalition take over the Vermont State Democratic Committee in 1984 and adopt a progressive state party platform, which the centrist elected Democrats from Governor Madeline Kunin and Senator Patrick Leahy on down just ignored without any consequences.

The party committees that count are the Democratic National Committee, the congressional and senate campaign committees, and their state counterparts. Increasingly since the 1970s, they have centralized the control of the private donations from the corporate rich and the hiring of party operatives. They use those resources to promote corporate centrists and oppose progressives. The centralized party caucuses in Congress and state legislatures discipline and tame progressives that do get elected from progressive-friendly districts with the carrots and sticks of legislative committee assignments and campaign funding from party committees for re-election.

An inside/outside strategy?

A variant of the progressive takeover strategy is the inside/outside strategy where progressives form an “independent” organization – sometimes called a “party within the party” – to support progressives in Democratic primaries and progressive independents against corporate Democrats in general elections. Proponents argue their strategy will heighten the contradictions between progressive and corporate Democrats, leading to a split where the progressives either take over the Democrats or lead a mass break away to form a viable independent progressive party.

I have been hearing this strategy advocated since the late 1960s by the leftwing of the party realignment advocates in the Michael Harrington wing of the Socialist Party, the left wing of the Rainbow Coalition in the 1980s, the Working Families Party since the 1990s, the Progressive Democrats of America since the mid-2000s, and the “dirty break” advocates in Democratic Socialists of America since in the mid-2010s. After 70 years of groups pursuing an inside/outside strategy, there has been no take over or break away by progressives.

The logic of the inside/outside strategy leads back inside the Democratic Party because running campaigns inside the Democratic Party means forswearing outside options in order to have access to Democratic committees, staff positions, campaign funding, primary ballots, and primary debates. Bernie Sanders had to promise to support the winner of the Democratic presidential primaries in 2016, which he expected when he announced in 2015 to be Hillary Clinton, in order to be allowed into the Democratic debates and onto the Democratic primary ballots. Then he had to campaign hard for Clinton in the general election in order to prove his loyalty and keep open his access to the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries.

Instead of confronting the corporate centrists with inside primary challenges and outside general election challenges, such groups that pursue the inside/outside strategy quickly retreat to making all inside activity supporting Democratic candidates and all outside activity street protests and issue campaigns. But those street protests and issue campaigns are really just lobbying and begging elected Democrats to do something for progressives whose votes these Democrats can take for granted.

Activists and reform organizations have to be either inside or outside the Democratic Party, not both. The Democratic Party power structure forces reformers to choose.[4]

Defensive lesser-evil voting?

The last resort of progressives advocating Democratic voting is they are the lesser evil. They may be corporate neoliberals, but they are not as bad as the Republican neofascists. The Republicans are indeed worse. But can Democratic neoliberalism beat Republican neofascism? It didn’t win in the 2016 and 2024 presidential elections. Moreover, the growing economic inequality that Democratic neoliberalism breeds has only fertilized the fields of resentment and scapegoating in which Republican neofascism has grown.

The Democrats don’t know how to fight the right. They compromise with it. To defeat the right, we need an independent progressive movement that the progressive majority can rally to. The progressive left should also understand that the popular classes are rejecting the Democratic Party. Post election polls have shown the Democrats’ favorability ratings at all-time lows. Favorability percentages are in the mid-30s and unfavorability is averaging nearly 60 percent.[5] Other polling shows majority support for an independent pro-worker party.[6] Progressives shouldn’t waste their time trying to rehabilitate the Democrats, who the then former Republican strategist Kevin Phillips ironically noted in 1990 is “history’s second-most enthusiastic capitalist party.”[7]

Third Parties Work

The first thing to remember about independent political action is that third parties had enormous influence on American politics for a century under the same electoral system we suffer under today. Third parties elected thousands of their members under this single-member-district, winner-take-all system that positions third parties as spoilers and thus tends to generate a two-party system. Despite the spoiler effect, from the 1830s to the 1930s, the electoral successes of independent progressive parties forced their demands into the center of national political debate and they won many of their demands.

The Workingmen’s Party of 1828-1831 of Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and other cities and towns was the first workers party in the world, formed when Karl Marx was a 10-year-old boy in Trier, Germany. The Workies, as they were known, elected some members to office in their first elections, but soon fell apart due to factionalism. But the third party movement of the 1830s carried forward their demands for free public education, free homesteads on public land, and the abolition of slavery into the Liberty Party of the 1840s, the Free Soil Party of the 1848-1854, and the abolitionist faction of Radicals in the upstart Republican Party from 1854 to 1877. The Radical Republicans won many of their demands with the Homestead Act of 1862, the Morrill Act of 1862 for land-grant public colleges, the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, the Radical Reconstruction Acts of 1867-68, and the 13th, 14th, and 15th Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution ratified between 1865 and 1870.

The farmer-labor populist Greenback-Labor Party of the 1870s and 1880s and the People’s Party of the 1890s also put their demands at the center of national debate. They elected hundreds to local offices, scores to state legislatures, and 24 members to the US House on their platform aimed at redressing economic inequalities and promoting the welfare of rural agrarian and urban working-class communities. Their demands included regulating monopolies, public ownership of railroad and telegraph utilities, a national currency of publicly-issued Greenbacks to expand economic activity and relieve debt, a progressive income tax, the 8-hour day, Black civil rights, women’s suffrage, and direct election of Senators. In due course, many of these demands were met.

It took the third party movement of the early 20th century to get many of the populists’ demands over the finish line. The Socialist Party, and many local- and state-based labor, farmer-labor, and progressive parties, elected thousands to local office and many to state houses and the US House. They won many of their demands: the progressive income tax, direct election of Senators, women’s suffrage, public utilities for water, sewage, and sometimes power, food safety laws, child labor laws, minimum wages, job creation through public works, old age pensions, and other reforms.

Unfortunately, independent working-class political action, the first principle of socialist politics since the aftermath of the democratic revolutions on 1848, has been lost on the American left since the Communists’ Popular Front policy of 1936 led most of the left and the unions into the Democratic Party. An independent progressive or socialist movement has yet to re-emerge from the Democratic Party as a mass-based independent movement with a distinct identity and its own mass political party.[8]

The New Left of the 1960s generated some independent political action, although most of the radicals of the 1960s increasingly retreated to the Democratic Party with the McGovern and Jackson campaigns. The first attempts to build a non-sectarian mass-based independent progressive party tried to build their parties out of presidential campaigns from the top down, including the Peace and Freedom Party of 1968, the People’s Party of 1972 and 1976, the Citizens Party of 1980 and 1984, and the Campaign for a New Tomorrow of 1992 that tried to take the Rainbow Coalition’s politics independent. They all failed.

The lesson here is that a presidential campaign will not organize a viable independent progressive political party. Even with household names who had as much name recognition as their major party competitors, like America’s baby doctor Benjamin Spock in 1972 and consumer advocate Ralph Nader in 2000, these campaigns were marginal to the two major party competition. Progressive third party presidential campaigns are likely to remain marginal until that party has a caucus in the US House that commands public interest and major media coverage. The lesson here is Lincoln’s election in 1860. He was not a third party candidate. The Republican Party he represented had been the second party in Congress behind the Democrats since the 1856 election.

The Labor Party of the 1990s did not try to build itself out of a presidential campaign. It got off to a promising start by focusing on building a base. It had affiliated unions representing 6 million workers. It organized extra-electoral campaigns for a job guarantee and free public higher education to increase its base. But its members lost enthusiasm because most people who joined expected to run independent Labor candidates. Many of the affiliated unions did not really want to run against the Democrats. Most of their leaders viewed the Labor Party as a pressure group on the Democrats, not an alternative to them. The endorsement process for Labor Party candidates was so centralized and onerous that few were endorsed. aMembers who wanted to challenge the Democrats got discouraged and peeled away. The lesson for the Labor Party experience is that we can’t call for an independent party and not run candidates. Without candidates, the party is no different from other NGOs that campaign for various reforms. People who want to run independent progressive candidates will look elsewhere. Many Labor Party members went into the Green Party in the early 2000s.

The Green Party took a different approach in the 1980s and 1990s. Instead of running a presidential candidate and hoping to build the party in the wake of a campaign that would inevitably be marginal and disappointing, the Greens decided at their first national organizing meeting in 1984 to go out and organize locals that would come together in periodic delegated congresses to compare notes on organizing and adopt national policy positions. Greens were soon getting elected to local office beginning in 1986. Their numbers steadily grew over time. Today, the Greens have won nearly 1,600 elections over the years and have more than 160 members in local office today. They won 50 of 92 local races they contested in 2024.[9] The Greens have elected more third party candidates than any independent progressive party since the Socialist, Farmer-Labor, and Progressive parties of the first third of the 20th century.

Despite its many organizational problems at the national level, the Green Party has persisted as the largest progressive independent party because it built a grassroots base with enough electoral successes to encourage people to keep going. The ranks of the Greens are also constantly replenished by disaffected activists who find the Democrats to be on the opposite side of issues they care deeply about, from local issues concerning environmental protection, affordable housing, police brutality, and equitable school funding to national positions on health care, climate, immigration, and wars like Iraq and Gaza.

The Greens have shown that independent progressives can win local elections. The task now is to scale that up across the country.

Who Can Fill the Progressive Political Vacuum?

The problem is that no one is organized nationally to fill the political vacuum on the progressive left.

The Green Party can’t do it with a national budget of $166,000 this year and a national structure so fragmented that it is incapable of adopting and implementing a national organizing strategy. The Greens changed from a national membership party to a memberless federation of state parties in 2001. As a memberless party like the Democrats and Republicans, changing its national structure and strategy is a bureaucratic snafu because it is not a one-member, one-vote democracy. It is more like a social movement with informal but unaccounatable centers of power within it. It will take a movement from below of dues-paying mass-membership local and state Green parties to create the democratic culture, accountability, and funding needed to build a democratically accountable national party that can develop and execute a shared national organizing strategy.

The small independent socialist groups talk about the need for a mass left or labor party but are too small and divided to do it themselves. Many in these groups say we cannot even start organizing that party until the social movements are stronger. I have been hearing that excuse from those quarters since we started the Peace and Freedom Party in 1968 when the Black freedom and anti-Vietnam war movements were at their zeniths and the feminist, gay, and environmental movements inspired by those movements were beginning to erupt.

The movement many of these socialists are really waiting for is the labor movement. Progressive trade unionists sometimes get resolutions for a labor party passed in some unions, but they cannot get a major union to back it with funding needed to build it. A progressive party salting the labor movement with activists who promote independent labor political action could bring a labor party into being long before the unions are ever going to initiate it on their own.

In the internet age there have been a number of efforts to build a new party online by collections of individuals representing no organized base, including the Justice Party in the early 2010s hoping to ride the anti-corporate Occupy Wall Street movement, the Peoples Party claiming it was taking the Sanders coalition independent, and now the Justice for All Party, hoping to build upon the small vote of Cornel West’s 2024 presidential campaign, and the rival Justice for All Party Grassroots trying to do it without Cornel West. These are talk shops at best and scams at worst (see the People’s Party[10]). They have not organized local or state affiliates or run their own candidates. They are a waste of time. Internet communities are no substitute for organizing in local geographic communities that reaches beyond in-group silos.

Build Local Mass-Based Independent Progressive Parties

The existential crises of climate, war, inequality, and democracy are accelerating under the Trump administration. The neoliberal corporate Democrats offer no real solutions and real solutions can’t wait. We can’t wait for a nationally coordinated drive to organize an independent progressive political party. But what progressive activists can do now in any community is organize a local independent progressive party. That is........

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